Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - The Art of Living A Pleasure-Filled Life - With Todd White

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

For full show notes, resources mentioned, and transcripts go to: www.drmindypelz.com/ep123/ To enroll in Dr. Mindy's Fasting membership go to: resetacademy.drmindypelz.com This episode is all about natural wine and the art of living as a connected community through pleasure.  As the founder of Dry Farm Wines, a writer, speaker, and a leader in the organic/Natural Wine movement, Todd White has widely educated communities on conscious consumption.  Todd is a self-described biohacker who practices daily meditation, Wim Hof breathing, cold thermogenesis, a ketogenic diet, and daily 22-hour intermittent fasting. He is also a frequent speaker on topics including meditation, and the Dry Farm Wines' unique company culture. Built on a foundation of honesty and peace, Dry Farm Wines has seen remarkable growth, making it one of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., without any debt or investors. Dry Farm Wines is endorsed by many leading U.S. performance influencers with pure Natural Wines that are lab tested to ensure each bottle is sugar-free (0-0.15g per glass), lower in sulfites, and lower in alcohol (under 12.5% alc/vol). The wines are friendly to low carb, Paleo, ketogenic, and low sugar diets.  Dry Farm Wines is proud to be the largest Natural Wine merchant in the world, bringing awareness to Natural Wine consumption and supporting farmers who honor the soil.  Please see our medical disclaimer.

Natural wine has a very specific farming and fermentation protocol that is globally understood for what it means for natural wine. Because it's better for you, better for the planet. And there's a big movement of people who care about that like us. Resetters, Dr. Mindy here. And I am on a mission to teach you just how powerful your body was built to be. This podcast is about giving you the power back and helping you believe in yourself. again. Let's jump in. On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I bring you Todd White. Now, there is so much to unpack on this conversation. So I want to highlight a few things.

And I want as you're listening, I want to make sure that you don't miss some of the real life gems that Todd gives in this conversation. So Todd is the founder of Dry Farm Wines. So of course, we're going to talk about wine and natural wine. But there's a bigger lesson for us all in this discussion. And that is the art of living from a place where we are connected as community, where we are respecting nature, where we are looking at the value of soil. And we are highlighting the importance of something as simple as the pleasure a glass of wine could give you to enhance conversation over the dinner table, to create deeper connections with people as we are in community around food, around wine, around family. There's so much here that I want to make sure if you are

listening and want to have a better understanding of wine, this is a great conversation. We're going to talk about natural wines, biodynamic wines, all the things that you need to know to to drink a healthy wine. But as you're learning that, I want you to hear from him the power of living a life in which we take care of each other, we take care of our soil, we honor what nature has given us, and we make time for pleasure and connection in order to not only feel good today, but to extend our longevity. such a richness in this conversation, and I'm so excited to bring it to you. And as always, I hope it moves your health and life forward and gives you a new perspective

in which to look at this beautiful planet we're living on, to look at the power of well-grown food, to look at how important something as simple as drinking a dry farm wine that can make you feel and help you connect to others. I want to elevate the conversation on lifestyle. And this one absolutely does it. Enjoy. Have you overall, you've been good? Terrific. I was just listening to David Sinclair's new podcast called Lifesman. His second episode, he's a friend, but the podcast was recommended to me is just a refresher. You know, the very first thing he said when asked, okay, what is the number one thing that we can do? to extend longevity and health span.

Eat less often. Woo! Yes. I was like, of course. Yes. I've been eating once a day for five years and do regular. It's so true. It's just like it's just so simple this message.

So simple. It's so simple. And it's free. It costs less actually. Yes. It's free and it costs less. Yes. Thank you for seeing that because that's been my message is like,

It doesn't cost money. It doesn't take time so everybody can do it. We just have to teach people how to start skipping meals. Peter Atia, Peter Atia calls it the most powerful drug we have. We just don't understand how to dose it. Ooh, I love that. And so then that comes an act of self-expermentation, you know,

because we just don't know how to dose it. really. Oh my God. I mean, you've got the K Hill study. You've got other, you know, you've, you've got some data, but not a lot on how to dose it. Yeah. Well, I can I can tell you that in December, I have a book called Fast Like a Girl. It's coming out, Hey House bought the book, and it's going to be six different length fast teaching women how to dose these different length fast to their hormones to her. One thing I'd like to get a more clear, picture on is the the the biological neurological and hormonal response to the duration of fast right yep um just a little bit better data on that so the because having experimented with a whole bunch of

different fasting protocols some are easier than others yes they are right and then for multi-day fast I feel like personally I get most of the benefit in a three-day fast like like No doubt. Yeah. Beyond that, there's benefit. It just feels declined. Yeah. Yeah.

It feels like the kind of the pulling out that like the extraction is happening in the first three days. I honestly think the only reason to continue past three days is because you've now created stem cells. So if you go four days, five days, it's like every moment is a stem cell surge. So I've used five days to heal an Achilles tendon. an injury. And on the, on the third day, I didn't feel any change, but by the fifth day, the pain was gone. And then once I broke the fast, literally the pain never came back. So there are metrics like that. And it's all based off stem cells after three days. That's really, that's really all we're going for.

That and, you know, there's some emotional satisfaction and kind of carrying it out and achieving a goal. And, um, and weight loss, if you want to accelerate, that if that's a goal. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. There's, yeah, definitely. But yeah, all right. Cool. So let me tell you what I think our audience would love to hear a little bit more. I don't know if you know this, but there's actually a lot of discussion amongst women hormone experts right now that women shouldn't be drinking alcohol at all. That when you are drinking alcohol, the liver is not breaking down estrogen. So they have been specifically attacking clean wines. And one thing that has my brain trying to figure out is when you look at culturally the

difference between like America and Europe, you know, in America, we tend to be a little more like puritan about how we approach things like alcohol. Whereas in Europe, You got women drinking bottles of wine all day long. And they're not having to think about the hormonal consequence. So I really want to kind of go down a path of like, what are the cultural differences around wine that you see? People have to remember. And we'll talk about this too.

Alcohol is a dangerous neurotoxin. Let's be clear. Okay. Very clear. And my life might even be improved if I didn't drink. But that's not the issue because I like to drink wine and I'm going to drink. And I find a pleasure center. in it. And living without pleasure is not joyful. So forget about it. Yes, I know it's toxic.

Now let's talk about how to dose that toxin. I love it. Yeah, okay, this is going to be great. Again, and let's just jump right into it. I already had enough material here to do two hours. I love talking about wine, by the way. And I want to tell you, and this is why I want to start this conversation here, that whenever I talk about wine, I always say I love talking about wine because after listening to you for so many years, after being a huge advocate of dry farm wines, I would say that's 99.9% of what we drink in our house. If we're forced to drink something else, we will. But people are really misguided on the toxic load of wine. And whenever I say I love talking about wine, I inevitably get somebody who sends us a message and says,

I'm concerned you're an alcoholic. Because if you love talking about wine. I may be. But, you know, that's, that's, I'm really not trying to assess that. What I'm going to assess is that I'm going to drink. I like wine. And I'm no worse for the way or for it. 61, right?

So it's, I believe eating less has a whole lot more importance than dosing alcohol correctly. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it's just a lot to talk about. Let's get started. Okay. So let's start with culture. I would say, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, in America, we tend to be a little more no alcohol, tons of alcohol.

Just comes from our puritanical roots. I mean, this is right back to the church, by the way, who also, you know, religion and wine have been paired together for centuries. But yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, when do you want to get started? Yeah. Is your intro here?

Do you have a question? Oh, God. No, Todd, this is how I roll. We just go into the conversation. All right. We look like three, two, one. There we go. Three, two, one.

Thank you, Todd White, for joining me on the Resetter podcast. And this is so much fun since we already just have. a podcast before we even started recording talking about all the things we could talk about and then we started talking about them so but here we are we don't even have wine in our hands it's well it's too early for me yeah i don't drink during the daytime and i don't recommend that other people do it either yeah so um it's a nighttime gift for me beautiful but um and i'll tell you one of the reasons and there's so many things to talk about is that you know is that um anytime we take in an exogenous substance or energy source such as alcohol.

I mean, it's going to stop fat burning, right? It's going to, the body's going to turn its attention to expelling what we'll talk about this toxin, right? Yep. And so, and I want to spend my days fasted. I only eat at night.

All done. And I don't want to, I don't want to interrupt that ketogenic state by introducing anything, including, alcohol, which will stop my fat burning. And so, you know, that's the reason I only drink in the evening. Unless I'm on an extended water fast, I drink every night. But it's not a question of if I drink, it's what I drink and how much, right? And that's what we can talk about. But, you know, one of the things that you mentioned earlier, I think it's really interesting is this

cultural difference between, say, Europe, which is sort of the birthplace of wine as we know it today, meaning, well, you know, wine's 9,000 years old, and it came from Macedonia and actually part of Asia. But as we know modern wine, modern wine, meaning the last few thousand years, right? Let's call it the last 3,000 years. That center has been in Europe. And Europeans have been making wine for 3,000 years and consuming wine on the regular. Now, we talked about this, and you asked me, what did I, I spent a lot of time in Europe because, as you know, we do not drink or sell domestic wine because there's no domestic wines that meet our certified criteria for health and purity. And so we only drink and sell wines from a few places all across Europe,

South America and South Africa. And we'll talk about what a natural wine means, but this cultural thing about, you know, how Europeans view a lot of things, including marriage. Yeah. You know, how Europeans view many things because they have had thousands of years of social evolution, right? Where we've only been, I don't know, 200 and whatever, 50 years here, 240, whatever the number is. We're a young country.

That's a very young. Yeah, we're very young. And we got settled by some people who were breaking away from the church, but we're still very grounded to religion. We've, you know, so we took on this sort of overtime, and it seems to have intensified in recent decades, even, this sort of puritanical approach to living, where the Europeans are just more soft with how they interpret the pleasure of life. And you can see this in how they eat, you can see this in how they drink, you can see this in how they express themselves in many different ways, including marriage for that matter. They're just different because they're softer

and more evolved. They don't have as many hardline positions about these social structures. And so they're a bit more laissez-faire, be and let be, right? And they also, Europeans, particularly the French and the Spanish and especially the Italians. You know, know, they have one in France, they call Chouaday, the spirit of life. So this thing to enjoy life, I talked to Mark Sisson a couple of weeks ago. I moved to Miami Beach this winter. And Mark 66, maybe 65, 66. Wow.

Looks great. Yeah, he's going to say he looks really good for that age. And he said, yeah, I mean, I would, yeah, I love to say. speak, but I'm, you know, I'm going to have to speak in a way that, you know, people will be surprised. And I was like, oh, really, what is that? And he said, well, you know, look, life, you know, as you age, I've done a lot. You know, I, um, you know, I'm, um, I'm, um, I'm, sun setting. I mean, it's like, life is about pleasure. And some days I have a piece of pie. Now, right, I'm a keto author. I, I do intermittent faster. I promote these things. I do, but you know what?

I don't live strictly by those standards. Sometimes I have a piece of pie. I was like, okay, well, sometimes I have a few French fries. Right. He said, sometimes I drink too much. You know, but this is life. Yeah. And we can't stay so strictly, puritanically focused on, you know, the absolutes or life won't be worth living.

Yeah. And I think that's more the approach of the Europeans in large property. But look, Europe is, I spent a lot of time in Europe. In 2019, I was in Europe about 200 days before the pandemic. Resume my European travel and speaking schedule in May at the Human Optimization Conference that's based in London. So conferences are starting back again. This May, they're opening everything. But yeah, that's awesome.

It's already open. I went last August. I went to Italy for a month, really just on vacation, and to drink wine. So, you know, this thing, the culture difference is just that the Europeans are just more relaxed about most everything as it relates to lifestyle, as it relates to how they socialize. You know, another great work of Dan Butner and others who study longevity in cultures is that, you know, You know, one of the single most important things, in addition to most of these cultures drink wine daily, but natural wine, you know, wine they make themselves, not these factory additive products that you see in the grocery store and wine stores. Wines like we drink and sell. So this, you know, is this sense of community.

Oh, yeah. So this culture that Europeans have in places like where these. centarians and super centarians. Super centarians, anybody who's over 105, Centarians 1 to 105, 105, and plus a super centarian. So where they study these,

you know, it's about community. Yeah. It's about people loving each other and being kind and gathering daily for, you know, rituals of socialization. Yeah. So really another important aspect. But let me stop the clock here and say one thing that surprises everyone to hear me say.

Alcohol is a very dangerous neurotoxin. It ruins millions of lives a year. Some people shouldn't drink at all. That being said, maybe even, I don't know, maybe even my life could be enhanced if I didn't drink. But all I drink is wine. I drink low alcohol, natural wines. I only drink at night. I only drink with food.

I have a whole bunch of wine rules. I only drink lower alcohol, natural wines. That's it. I happen to like wine and I happen to like alcohol in fairly moderate doses. And with the glorious exception, sometimes it's an occupational hazard. I'm overserved. Yes. But this has its place in time as well.

But on the regular, I'm not interested in that because I live a mindful, peaceful life. I meditate in the morning. I'll work out every morning. I don't want to sacrifice my morning for the pleasure of my night. Yeah, agree. And we think a lot about that. And so is there a lot of debate if you do a pub med search on, you know, drinking versus non-drinking, women, drinking, not drinking, hormonal change is not drinking.

You can find published articles peer reviewed on both sides of whether it's beneficial or harmful. Yeah. Right. Well, I'll tell you what's interesting on that. note is that I absolutely agree. I mean, you go to PubMed, you can find anything that will back up your opinion on anything. So just because it's a science-based site doesn't mean that it's the most accurate information for your lifestyle. And what I would say with the pleasure piece and what I love what you're saying. And you actually taught me this years ago when I first

started to learn about dry farm wines is that when I have a glass of, dry farm or of a natural wine or whatever we're going to call this. So we're going to unpack the name here in a moment because I call it dry farm. So we'll unpack that name. But when my cortisol goes down, my blood sugar goes down. And I can actually see it on my CGM after a glass of wine sitting at a meal, having a meal with a glass of wine on our back deck with my husband and my blood sugar goes down. To me, that is pleasure in blood sugar action. And I think to your point, we have lost sight of the art of enjoying something like wine in moderation

and using it as a enhancing relationships and community and getting your body to just calm down. Do you feel like that's the wrong approach? Well, people believe I'm here trying to sell wine, which I'm not really, educate people. So yes, of course, I believe that's the business I'm in. Not only that, it's the life that I live. And so I think life should be fun. I'm a hedonist. I like pleasure. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Puritanical values, you know, shun hedonism or the

act of having a pleasurable life. I just don't agree with that. And, you know, I think that, you know, we're, we're programmed to serve. I mean, I think the greatest and most noble act of being a human is to serve others. And second to that is to enjoy your very, very short time on this planet, right? Because it's a really, really short time when you look at the two and a half billion years that the Earth has been developing itself. And, you know, the couple of million, million years we've been walking around on two feet. And it's like, and just looking back over a few years of history, you just know that the time any one person spends here is super, super short. Yeah.

So true. And of course, the older you get, the more you appreciate that. Yep. As I always say, youth is wasted on the young. Right. So, you know, the act of having pleasure, first of all, I firmly believe the act of service is our most noble calling. But once we get that out of the way, which you're doing and I'm doing and we feel a purpose driven life, then then, you know, we should enjoy our existence and find ways to increase our pleasure and the pleasure of those around us. And for me, drinking wine.

We'll talk about the type of wine in a moment, what natural wine is and what it means to be a dry farm certified wine. but this, you know, this act of living with pleasure is shunned by some, right, as, as indulgent. I just don't sign on to that camp. Yeah. And I think life should be more fun. Purpose driven with fun. Yes.

And so, you know, might my life be enhanced if I didn't drink at all? I don't know. That's not going to happen, right? Because I like wine. and wine is doing nothing as far as I can tell to interrupt my health span and maybe increasing it. Yep. And so, you know, the thing that, as we talked about earlier, and David Sinclair starts his lifespan podcast with this, the single number one thing that's going to impact your life the most in longevity and

health span is eating less, less often. Yes. And so and if you drink too much, that's clearly a problem. Right. And so in that case, you need to drink less, less often. Right? Or just stop drinking altogether. Yes.

And look, it's fair to note, most regular wine drinkers who are drinking conventional poisonous wine feel bad and think they drink too much. Yes. But when they discover a better natural, organic, sugar, free lower alcohol expression of wine that's filled with living bacteria that's friendly to the gut microbiome and wine that hasn't been sterilized with sulfur dioxide, right? To kill everything in it is beneficial for you, which is why our wines taste different because they're actually alive.

You know, they have bacteria and you can taste the spirit and life of the wine. They don't taste like these dead products that you get out of the store. You know there's a very distinct difference in two because you've, drank a lot of both, I'm sure. Oh, I could, I almost, I'm not a sommelier in any way, shape, or form, but you could put four different wines in front of me, and I'm pretty sure I can pick your wine out because of exactly what you're talking about. There is a different taste profile to it.

I definitely could pick it out the next day and how I feel. Right. For sure. For sure. Anyway, let's talk about what natural wine means. And because we, you know, we've talked about this before, but it's a super confusing term. for a bunch of different reasons. Yes.

Enlighten us. Yeah. So one, it's considerably confusing because I tell people I'm in the natural wine business. They're like, oh, really, well, aren't all wines natural? It's like, no, they're not. And I'm going to tell you why. But so that's the first point in confusion. Number two, in the food industry, in the food industry, the term natural is often used

is a fuzzy marketing term to describe products that are not organic, but are suggestively better for you. The same as when you see wine companies, like we have a bunch of copycats because we've been kind of successful and people want to follow us and see if they can get their toe in the water. And, you know, so, because nobody does what we do, but they'll say things like sustainably farmed. They want to lead you to believe that they're organic. But sustainable farming is not organic. Let's be clear.

Sustainable farming means we use chemicals when we want or they'll tell you when we need. Well, there's a fuzzy line between want and need and farming. Is that the same in food too? Yes. Yes. But they use the, but in food, this term natural is thrown around a lot in the suggestion of better for you food products when in fact it's nebulous and natural means nothing. However, in wine, natural wine has a very specific farming and fermentation protocol that is globally

understood for what it means for natural wine. And more people than ever, because the education we've done, more people than ever know what natural wine is. When I started selling natural wine and drinking natural wine six years ago, nobody knew what it was. So it has, it has prolificated across many major cities and people who are interested in taste and style and hipsters and taste and, you know, better for you and better for the planet products, they know what natural wine is because it's better for you, better for the planet. And there's a big movement of people who care about that like us. Right.

So, but natural wine, here's the problem with conventional wines before we get in. Let me tell you what's happened. to the wine business. The same thing that happened to our food supply. Yes. So basically in the food business, nine or ten companies control nearly everything that flows through the grocery store.

Right. And the same thing has happened in our wine supply. So using cheap money off a Wall Street, these big aggregators have come in and consolidated to what they call roll at the industry. Right. So they buy everything up. They gain scale using cheap public money.

And because the way alcohol is distributed, this is very important. It's not how we distribute wine, but this is how conventional wine gets in your grocery store. It's called, and this is really important to understand why this poisoning is exclusively commanding all the shelf space. is that in the three-tier system, as it's known, which is federally mandated and adapted and managed by each state individually, the three-tier system was developed and what are called the tighthouse rules were developed in the 1940s post-prohibition to keep organized crime from dominating the alcohol business. Now, these laws are no longer needed because organized crime. has no chance of dominating any of the alcohol business. But these three-tier systems have been kept in place

to protect the entrenched interest of the distributors and the wholesalers that exist and are multi-generational family owned in each state. So here's how it works. I'm going to get back to the roll-up of the industry and how this fits into all this in a moment. But I just to give you education about why this wine is in your store and you don't have other options. You don't have natural wine options when you go in the grocery store.

They're not there. At any grocery store? No. Zero. So now, that being said, if you live in New York City, if you live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago,

if you live in a major progressive market, you will have a scattering, a very small scattering of natural wine retailers. Now, these wines are not dry farm wine certified. We'll get into what the difference, but they are natural wines. And if you're going to drink wine, we believe you should drink a lower alcohol, natural wine.

And if you live in major markets, it is possible to go in and find through a Google search. You can find natural wine retailers in New York. Yeah. Now, let me get back to the three-tier system, why you can't get better for you beverages in the grocery store. Here's how three-tier works. The importer or the wine producer must is required by law to sell to a distributor. These distributors are typically very small in numbers.

They control most, a handful of them control all the activity in your state. So you must in order, by law, in order to get license and sell wine at the store, at retail, you must sell to this distributor. This distributor sells to a wholesaler. The wholesaler in turns to a retailer. And the retailer sells to the consumer. But let's start back at the top of the food tank with the distributor because these are the people who control what comes into your state and gets on your grocery shelf. Now we go back to the roll up of the industry.

So fuel, because this is all about money and greed and power. Yeah. About why you don't have better few products, so you can just walk in your store and buy. Yeah. is no money in it is the problem. So here these big consolidators, these huge wine conglomerates, they've rolled up the industry, went and bought up all the players, right? 52% of all the wines you see in American retail are made by just three giant companies.

And the top 30 wine companies in the United States make over 70% of U.S. wines. They don't want you to know that. So they have, I have thousands of brands and labels. Whoops, there's something else they have behind. There's 76 additives approved by the FDA for the use in wine making. And they don't have to disclose those because through their lobby efforts, wine industry spent millions of dollars of lobby money to keep contents labeling and nutritional information off of wine bottles. This is corruption 101.

Yeah. So here's how the problem with the distributor three-tier network is that see the consolidators, these three companies are these top 30 or 50 companies, they control most of the supply. So they're cozy with the distributor. So small suppliers can't get in, can't get short store space because these big suppliers have these cozy, convenient relationships with the only people who can get your wine to the store.

And so it's one, is one beast feeding the other. And it doesn't give small producers an opportunity. to compete, right? And so that, I mean, that's the very simplistic view of a large part of the problem about why systematically and fundamentally you can't get better for you, wine into your store is because there's just not enough money in it. Yeah. And so these, and also the other problem with it, that's the primary problem. The other problem is in Americans, buy brands they know.

Yeah. Right. And these natural wine growers, the ones you drink from us, you've never heard of them. No. Not a single one. You've never heard of them.

Because none of them have advertising budgets. None of them have store space. None of them have in caps and grocery stores. You haven't heard none of them have magazine advertisements. None of them have, you know, media because it's too small. A lot of them are blends. And I realize that. sometimes I'm not even, I'll just drink it just to taste it and have the experience of it.

And I realize, I don't even know what grapes are in this. And then I go to look and I don't even know. And you never heard of any of the grapes. You don't even know what they are. That's right. Which is another, which is another incredible aspect of what we do is that you see, natural wines are made from very often. See what Americans know are the top eight.

Cabernet, Merlot, Savillon Block, Chardonnay, sarah the top kind of top eight grapes that that's what's grown in America and what they know and what's sold here because people buy what they know natural wine farms which are very often more often than not multi-generational family farms and they're dedicated and also natural wine growers believe in old vines right so conventional winemakers don't because older vine gets while its character of fruit and disputably becomes better, its yield decreases significantly. Lower the yield, the less money there's in it. So everything, including like irrigation, is about money.

We'll get to irrigation in a moment. But so anyway, this, this natural wine, you can't, you just, problem is you can't get access to it. in America. Right. Well, even in Europe, you get better access, but still in European, the EU is also greed driven in a place of immense wealth. So this scale and consolidation is not strictly an American issue. It's just we do it better than anybody else. Yeah.

We do scale better than anyone. Would you say that, would you say it's sort of the equal? to conventional farming versus regenerative farming is what I'm hearing. When you're going with a natural wine that has this appreciation of the way the grapes are grown, the history of the vines. What we're looking at is that's like a farmer who just tends to all of the... It's a great point. What I was about to finish saying on the grape types, all the ones that you don't know because they're ancestral grapes. Yeah. That are indigenous to the region where these natural farms are. So they're not grown

because they're easier. They're not grown because they're more marketable. They're grown because they're ancestral. Oh, I love that. Right. And so now with with respect to farming, we can cover irrigation under the same conversation. So, and, I'm going to talk about industrialized organic farming. What does that mean? This is really interesting. And I thought of it from a point that you just made. Industrialized organic farming is what I call the organic food section in your vegetable aisle in the grocery store.

So let's take it. This is where living soils and the love of a living soil. and the love of how a family farm communicates with nature. It's beyond just organic. This is the reason it's super important to support small family farms through your farmer's market or by drinking natural wines or these are people who are protecting the planet. These are people who are trying to save the planet and need and deserve our support.

They don't make a lot of money. Yeah. Well, right. I mean, our wines are super affordable and delivered to your door at $25. it's a bottle. They're all the same price. I mean, it's not treachery. It's super affordable for a handcrafted product. So nobody's making a lot of money here. So what is important is this industrialized organic, as I call it. So, and here's how you know what I'm talking about. When you go to the farmer's market, you will see vegetables there and fruit, I think particularly

vegetables that are so teeming with vibrancy and color and life. You take pictures of. of it. Right? You get your iPhone out and you take pictures of this cabbage. Yeah. Right. Because the, the, the, the nourishing vein structure on it is popping so robustly. And the color is so deep and rich because this is real food grown in a loving environment by a small family farm. these cabbage or carrots or artichokes or broccoli or anything that you see at the farmer's market is teeming with this vitality. It's just so beautiful. Yeah.

And lush. I take pictures of it. That's not what I do that all the time. Of course you do. I'm like enamored with it. Yep. Of course you do. It's fascinating.

You're drawn to it because it's filled with life. Yep. Well, when you go into the organic section, your grocery store, it doesn't look like that. No, it doesn't. I'll tell you why, because that's what I call industrialized organic. Is it organic? Yes. Is it better for you than chemical farming? Yes, for sure. Is it the same as something that came out of living soil that has been nurtured by the love and spirit of this family? No, it's different. And natural wine growing is exactly the same way. You can think of natural wine growing as the farmer's market grapes.

Yeah. And so this is because, you know, when you go to, I have a home in Napa Valley. When you go to Napa, it's a beautiful place. It's a wonderful place to live. It's a wonderful place to this. But you have tasting rooms that are, you know, multi-million dollar, you know, kind of shrines to architecture. And that's not how it is when you go to a natural wine farm.

You know, there's these fancy tasting rooms. when you get a natural wine farm, the very first thing, always, the very first thing, and I don't care if it's raining, snowing in the middle of winter in central Europe where it is cold A.F. Right. The first thing the farmer wants to do is take you to the vineyard and talk about the soil and pick up the soil when it's wet and cold, run it through your hands, talk about it and stand out there in the driving snow or rain. most buying trips occur in the winter time to Europe because that's when the farmers are not working. So that's when they have time to sell you wine.

Right. So almost all buying trips occur between December and April. Interesting. In January and February in Central Europe is super cold. And so, you know, they want to take you, there is no tasting room, almost never. You usually end up tasting either in the. the cellar. That's after you've been in the vineyard for an hour, talking about soil and and vines. And, you know, and I can just tell you, I've suffered this many times in the cold.

And it's always the very first place that they take you. Yeah. And of course, they're farmers. So, you know, as cold doesn't mean anything to know. Yeah, they got thick skin. You know, some city boy like me. And it's like, it's cold out there, right? So, so the, so then if you do taste, it's at their kitchen table. You know, it would be in the cellar, you know, on a board that's propped up, you know, between two barrels. I mean, literally, there's nothing fancy about it. Yeah. But you can feel the spirit of the farm, right?

And so. There's a vibration is what I'm hearing. There is a vibration there because nature has vibration. Nature loves rhythms. And when nature is in rhythm, you can feel its vibration. Ooh, mic drop. That was good. No, it's true.

True. It's true. And that's what you're feeling at the market. What I'm hearing is when you see that beautiful cabbage at your farmer's market, you're attracted to the vibrancy of that, which is what in a natural wine, what I hear is it's not just the care of the soil. It's the family. It's the community that is surrounded around the art of it. It's called tawhar in France. It's like it's tarwar is a French term used to describe that the one. wine tastes like the place that it's from. Right. And each vineyard is a place. So let's go to irrigation, right? So why do you irrigate? Because it's cheaper and it's more profitable. Why do you farm conventionally with chemicals?

Because it's cheaper and more profitable. And so this irrigation has all kinds of problems as it's associated to the health of the vine, the quality of the fruit, the character of the fruit, and the polyphenol content inside the fruit. The health compounds inside of the fruit are diminished, both in non-organic fruit and in irrigated fruit. It might not surprise you that when you fill a grapeberry with water, it dilutes everything inside of it, including its flavor character and compounds. Why would you irrigate? Because it's cheaper. It creates a bigger yield.

Yield is the size of the cluster. And the cluster weighs more because it's filled with water. and, you know, and bigger yields from nitrogen from nitrogen that has been used to fertilize it, making for a lazy vine. So I don't want to lose the point on the polyphenol. If the content, the vitamin, mineral, polyphenol, all the nutritional aspects of this grape, the vibration of the community, the richness of the soil, it's all going in your wine. So does that make wine a health fit?

look, I have no idea. Neither is anybody else. You know, resveratrol, which is the most widely known and famous polyphenol found in red wines. We can talk about why polyphenols are higher in red wines in a moment. We talk about fermentation. But so I'm not here to tell you that wine is a health food. Nobody knows. We don't know much about nutritional.

we don't know much about nutrition in general because we just don't have controlled group studies. The only way to get real nutritional information over a long period of time is to use it on prisoners, which is thought to be unethical, right? And so we don't have quality controlled group studies on any kind of nutrition, including alcohol, including wine, including broccoli. You know, we just don't have it. We have, you know, we have, you know, we have You know, I love the proverb when I think about all these things, to feel is to understand. And we have data, just not good data, but we do know how we feel. Right.

And so we do know that you feel much better when you drink a natural wine versus a conventional wine. 100% this is indisputable i don't know anybody who doesn't have that experience 100% and fortunately it's enabled us to have a nice family business where we can survive and make a living selling natural wine because the product is indisputably better yeah it tastes better it makes you feel better yeah period end of story i don't know a single person doesn't agree with they might not like it no their cases where something like you know i want a heavier richer wine well natural wines aren't heavy and rich. Because those manipulations that get you to heavy and rich are not what natural wine is. By the way, no, no, don't take offense to this, but I stopped bringing natural wine to other people

and handing the dry farm wines because they don't appreciate it. And it's got a more complexity. And if you're used to drinking a Napa, Zinn or a cab, you're going to, a dry farm wine is going to taste way different. So they're going to say, I don't, it's, it's watery. It's them. It's like, well, because you're not drinking all these additives. That's right. Color agents. Yeah. Body stabilizers. Sugar. Yeah. Which gives mouth field of wine and gives that long finish to wine. That's sugar. Yeah. All right. And glycerol. So it doesn't contain all those things. But those are also the things that are bad for you and make you feel bad. Right. Right. And people will drink it because they get pallet adjusted. Right. Just the same thing happens. the same thing happens when they do drink our wines for a week or two, right? And then they go back to drink this other wine. They're like, whoa. Yep. This is like cough syrup.

I didn't know. See, most of us, we like to believe that we're very adventurous in the way we eat. Oh, you know, I'm adventurous. I'll try anything. The fact of the matter is most of us eat and drink the same thing every day. Yeah. Yeah. with very little exception.

Right. Which destroys our micro-bium. We go to the same restaurants and we order the same dishes. Yep. Right? Because we're creatures of habits. Yes. And so, and many of us are challenged to break these habits, even if we know they're bad for us.

Yeah. There's an article. I just want to say on that point that that behavior is killing us because if you- Of course it is. If you just look at the- But we don't care. Right. No, we don't know.

Well, we do know. Let me give you an example. Let me give you. Oh, I don't, you give people a little more credit. I think people don't know. They know. They know. As an article in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, it said, we can prevent the number one cause of death that kills three times as many people last year as COVID did worldwide, which is cardiovascular disease. We know how to prevent it. There are three primates. ways to prevent it. We know what those are, smoking, hypertension, and air pollution. This is known science. That's pretty widespread. People know that if you eat less, less often, you don't smoke, you spend time in nature, you maintain lower cortisol levels

by spending time in nature and not putting yourself in bed. cardiovascular disease last year killed 35 million people. COVID killed 10. Yeah. Worldwide. But even though we know, and look, fasting is for most people is the single most, like, I mean, forget it. You just try to give them to eat slow carbs and just, you know, be, just be moderate.

That's hard enough to tell them that they can't eat. I mean, this is, you know, only the. most converted. Now, as we discussed earlier, I only eat once a day and I would never return to eating more than once a day. Yeah. I mean, just like my energy level would just be off. Yeah.

I just, I'm not even interested. It's two o'clock in the afternoon in Florida. And I have zero interest in eating. I haven't eaten since last night. Oh, you're just getting your ketone high now. You're like in the sweet spot. Even when I do eat tonight around 6 o'clock, it won't be because I'm. hungry, it will be because I want to drink wine.

Right. And so, and if I didn't drink wine, I'd probably eat my only meal about three o'clock in the afternoon. And probably some days I just forget to eat. Yeah. Yeah. I eat usually, not because I'm hungry because I want to have a glass of wine. Yeah.

So because I'm a hedonist, which is the other reason I only eat once a day because I feel better. Yeah. And, and, and people like, aren't you hungry? No, I'm not hungry ever, right? It's like, well, how do you do that? I mean, do you get enough calories? Well, actually, I hope not.

I'd actually like to be eating fewer calories. Yes. Right. So, I mean, we know that calorie restriction is one of the only known effective ways to increase lifespan in organisms, never been shown in humans, of course, but, you know, and worms and yeast and mice and so on and so forth. So, but, so irrigation. Let's go to...

Yeah. So I want to really make it applicable in the time that we have. So how does somebody pick a wine when we look at natural, sustainable, biodynamic? How do you... Is it even possible to navigate a wine list

and figure out? No, you can't. It's not even possible for me to navigate it. Interesting. So there's a couple of reasons for that. And I can give you some practical solutions for it. But there's a couple of reasons for it. But there's a couple of reasons for it.

First of all, there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of wines in the world. So you can look in a wine list. Unless it's a brand you know that's been publicized through media, you won't have any idea what any of the wines are. I care about lower alcohol. So if there's a wine person there, if there's a Somme or a wine director, I might ask, although it generally gets nowhere, I might ask, do you have any lower alcohol wines? I consider lower.

The demarcation for lower alcohol in the wine world is 12.5%. So do you have a wine that's, they'll never have anything below 12. Do you have a wine that's 12 or 12 and a half percent? They will look at you like you have a third eye. They have no idea. We do it all the time. We actually have to bring them. the bottle. We're like, just bring the bottle to us and let us stick at it. So here's what I do. Next,

you could ask, do you have organic wine? Now, just because wine is organic doesn't mean it's natural, but we're one step closer. Okay. And then the third and the best cheat is to look for colder regions, generally in central France, Bojolet, Loire Valley. These are cold central wet and cold burgundy. But burgundian wines have some other issues because of the style of the way the wines are made there. They're typically higher in alcohol.

They're highly extracted and they got a lot of oak in them. So, but Bojolet, which gets kind of a bad rap because of Nouveau. Beaujolet and the way that the region's been industrialized. But it's a colder, wetter place in France. So if you want to get to lower alcohol, you need to get places where it's colder. And that's just the way the grapes grow? Well, here's how you get higher. Alcohol is higher sugar.

Right. So the sugar at the time of harvest, the sugar in the berry will determine the corresponding alcohol level. at the end of fermentation. The more sugar there is to ferment, how you ferment wine is you have yeast and juice that's filled with sugar, and the yeast activate, whether they're native yeast, which is natural wine or commercial yeast, GMO, which is conventional wines,

either way, yeast activates, and it starts to eat sugar as the food source. And so this is how you ferment wine. The byproduct of this eating of the sugar from the yeast is carbon dioxide and ethanol alcohol. That's how you make wine. The more sugar there is to eat, meaning the higher the sugar content at the time of harvest, also known as bricks in the industry. You can measure it in the field. This is another problem with irrigation. When you fill a grapeberry with water, you have to get the sugar higher.

this is not this is common sense you have to get sugar higher the fruit riper to have proper flavoring because the berries fill will water and so but either way the higher the sugar is at the time of harvest will determine the corresponding alcohol at the end of the fermentation more sugar the higher the alcohol the point of a coloree cold region is that grape that grape must in warmer regions is optional. In a colder region, that grape must be harvested earlier because the cold weather comes in earlier. Okay. The earlier is harvested, the lower the sugar is in the grape. And then when you ferment it, the lower the outcome of the alcohol is. Interesting. Okay.

The other thing that's interesting, I don't know why this phenomenon is true. But even if it's a conventional wine and it's lower in alcohol, it is more likely to be more natural. People who make lower alcohol wines make wine in a more natural way. I don't know what the phenomenon there is, but the lower alcohol wines, even if they're not, quote, natural, they taste better. They're more natural, even though they may not beat all the qualifications of natural. But the other thing to be aware of,

when you get a dry farm wine certified wines. So there's no certification for natural wines yet. 2023, France is going to be the first country to certify natural wine. Beautiful. This is a great move. France also says in 24 that they're going to be the first country to put contents labeling on a wine bottle, which is also a great step forward. Amazing. Don't think it'll happen in the U.S., but it's a great step forward. But dry farm wines has a certification process that's over and beyond just.

natural. And the one thing I wanted to touch on before we wrap up here is that sugar and alcohol are nasty dance partners. Right. And so you'll know this to be true. And all of our wines are sugar-free and lab tested by us. The only way to know if a wine is sugar-free is the lab test. But the reason that you know this nasty partnership between sugar and alcohol, if you have a shot of tequila. Well, let's say two. Or you drink two margaritas. How you feel from taking just the shot of tequila is going to be very different than how you feel from drinking the margarita. Yes. Both while drinking it as well as the next day. Sugar and alcohol just don't make good playmates. And so, well said. So, you know, sugar is poisonous in the first place. And I'm rabidly

anti-s sugar. But when it combines with alcohol, the effects and the outcome become disastrous in terms of how you feel and the stress it puts on your body to process it. Yeah. So is biodynamic just so, because that's one that gets thrown around, is that just mean that they used ancient farming strategies that don't require sprain? What does biodynamic mean? Well, so biodynamic is, I like to think of it this way.

So biodynamic is not that. Biodynamic farming was created by a scientist called Rudolf Steiner in 1925. And it was in response to see in the early 20s is when you had the beginning. It accelerated later, but the beginning of both monocultural farming, which is the farming of a single crop, monocultural farming and chemical farming in particular got introduced in the early 1920s. In response to this, there were some activists and leading thinkers like Rudolph Steiner who said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can't do this. This is going to kill the planet.

It's going to lead to poor farming practices and poor product, poor food product, poor industrial product. So he created biodynamic farming. And biodynamic farming, the simplest way to think of it is it's a prescriptive, advanced form of organic farming. So all biodynamic farming is always organic. Okay. And biodynamic farming basically involves two tenants. One is farming by lunar cycle. Right.

So by the moon cycle, by the tide, right? So biodynamic farmers believe that the energies from the lunar cycles impact decisions in farming, like when to harvest, as an example. When to prune your grapes or when to manage your canopy. Canopy is the leaf cover over the fruit, right? So the canopy is there to protect the food from the sun. But you have canopy management throughout the growing season to sometimes give the grapes a little bit more sun. Right. And so those techniques and styles vary from grower to grower.

The second tenant, one is the lunar farming. The second is that they spray what they believe, there's no scientific proof to this, what they believe are prescriptions. to the vines. And what I mean by prescriptions, that's what they're called. They're called prescriptions or formulas. One is like a white quartz that's been ground up into water.

The white quartz rock. Right. Another is manure that has been buried in the ground in a bull's horn at a specific site in the vineyard. and then it sits there for a specific period of time, and then it's harvested from the ground and mixed in this preparation, as they're called, they're called preparation. Then the preparation is sprayed on the grapes, sprayed on the plants. And these prescriptions and preparations are thought to be natural enhancements to, and they may work.

There's no evidence that they do or do not work. and biodynamic wines, in my opinion, very often tastes better. Now, why is that? And here's the way I explain that. Also, not all biodynamic wines are natural. There's a very large wine company in the United States that's biodynamic and sells widely throughout the grocery store system through three tier. But it's not a natural wine. It is biodynamic.

There's a biodynamic certification. The biggest one is in Germany called Demeter. So, but here's how I think about biodynamic wines. Anybody who will obsess over their farming practices and over lunar cycles and these preparations and anyone who obsesses to this degree over a farming practice is just going to grow better fruit period. Yes. Right.

And so anybody who's that obsessive and these people are obsessive. Yes. Right. Anybody who obsesses at that level is likely just to make a better wine. Yeah. And their vibrancy back to the frequency is going to be going into the wine. When you talk to natural wine growers, they talk about the spirit of nature, growing the natural. You know, the relationship, the spiritual relationship between the plants, vines communicate to each other. Trees talk to each other. We know this. Yes.

This is not speculation. We know that plants talk and communicate. that mushrooms communicate, that, you know, we've got this whole infrastructure under the living soil that is billions of organisms. This is another reason that natural wine farmers don't often plow their land because they want to maintain the life of those organisms beneath the surface, which are teeming with billions of tiny organisms. Here's what happens is when you plow, you turn that. soil over and you expose that soil to the sun and you kill these living organisms.

Fascinating. Yeah. Another reason that when you go to and you should come to Europe with us sometime. I would love to. And tour these small family farms and, you know, very often, most often, when you walk into a natural vineyard, grass, wildflowers, they're growing chest high. they're competing with the vines. Because the natural farmer wants insects, butterflies, they want all that nature attracts.

That's how you keep the balance and you don't have to use chemical farming because nature will balance itself out. Yep. Right. And so it often looks like a small forest beneath the vines, right? It's not manicured at all. Yeah. It's not barren at all. It always has vegetation on it.

because that's kind of how things grow. If you go into nature, that's how everything grows. Yep. It doesn't grow in this way that's manicured. Yeah. Yeah. It just everything fights against each other. Right.

And that's what provides the balance and the sort of the kind of universal connected source energy that is nature. That is the rhythm of nature. You know, we have, we turned our front yard into a vegetable garden. and it always looks beautiful. Like right now it's starting to look great. And then once everything dies, we just let it go right back into the earth. And it looks horrible.

I mean, my front yard will look horrible for a while. But then the next year, another wonderful thing grows out of that. And to your point, the complexity of the art of growing anything like that is going to serve your health in a bigger way. So I think what I want everybody to take away is this isn't just wine. I mean, Todd is, you're, somebody's talking to. Something came on my phone. Yeah. I was like, good gosh, what is that?

Anyway. But what I want that what I want to off with is what I hear from you is the intention, the care, the process, the energy that goes into making a natural wine. We can apply that philosophy to food. We can apply that to relationships. We can apply that to our lifestyle. So I don't want people to lose the nuance of your passion around wine because what I'm also hearing from you is a whole different way to approach life. That when you do that, that is longevity.

Would you agree? Yes. For sure. Beautiful. For sure. So let me finish up on this. This is our third season of the Resetter podcast. And so we are asking everyone what their gratitude, daily gratitude, practice.

Do you have a daily gratitude practice? I do. I start every morning with 28 minutes of concentrated meditation. And just following that, I have probably 10 minutes of concentrated gratitude. And just following that, I have about a half hour of journaling and life planning and may also express other gratitude through my writing. but typically it's just following meditation. And then I think the other thing is really important in a healthy gratitude practice is to be sure and tell other people how grateful you are for them.

So true. You know, like my long time friendship with you, I'm very grateful for that. Yeah, me too. Thank you. You know, it's been great and very rewarding. So,

yeah, it's just after my meditation practice. It's daily. It's not, it's five or ten minutes, not that long. I try not to belabor it. Usually there's, you know, there's oftentimes some, I'm at the beach. That's a helicopter flying across the doors open. Anyway, I, you know, I'm very often grateful for my health.

It's probably the thing that I am most grateful for because without health, there's not everything else has kind of come secondary to that even your even your security just health is just like I mean financial security your your health is you know the person who's unhealthy has only one wish yes and the person who's in great health has a thousand wishes and so I'm very often grateful for my health and and also for the abundance that I have around me people who love me these are kind of things and I'm very typical typically Today, I was grateful for the law of attraction, actually. I was writing about it.

Awesome. Grateful that's something else this morning. I was grateful to be living my truth. Speaking and living my truth was something that I was grateful for this morning. Grateful to be present and mindful. So anyway, there's a lot. We could go on. Yeah, I was going to say, we could talk about why.

This is why I say, like, wine is one of my most favorite subjects because it is the door in the way, and I want to really ditto this back to you. Like, I'm grateful for what you've taught me about the art of wine because really what you've taught me is the art of living through so many conversations. And I feel like this discussion on wine, the way you look at wine is the door in to not just a pleasure-filled life, but a healthy lifestyle where you can not only live long, but live with happiness and joy around you all the time. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.